The Metaphysical Athlete

Athletes spend a lot of time trying to understand. The problem is that they try to understand too much, in their exuberance they read too much.

They put too much enthusiasm into the researching, and not enough into the actual doing.

The enthusiasm spills over into throwing money at technology and equipment to measure output to try and predict outcomes, which is understandable enough. The problem is more than one half of the whole picture is missing, what is it that’s missing? The athlete. The organism in the chain that makes up the performance. If you take away say a power meter, or super flash set of wheels, you might go a little slower, however what if you take away the organism, what have you got then?

I read the other day that sports science is heading towards charting performance outcomes directly from training data analysis. Predicting the actual outcome. To me this is non sensical. It completely ignores the human psychological aspect of the equation. Now you could argue that tracking metrics adds confidence, and of course it can. However, in some athletes this adds pressure, in some anxious types, the constant measuring adds anxiety. In some athletes that struggle to focus the measuring adds to the detachment.

In young athletes, and even in older age group athletes, it hampers skill development.

There is a whole myriad of aspects that you can’t measure inside a human being. There is an immense depth within a human being that will never be reached by science, in the same way that there is immense depth in the universe that will never be reached by science.

What does this have to do with sport? Everything! Only looking at metrics is like an astronomer only looking at the Earth and ignoring the rest of universe.

The depth of performance can only be matched by the depth in the athlete. No depth, no focus, no performance.

Without the depth of the human, there is no desire and there’s no fire. No heart and guts and there’s no desire to move towards pain, no willingness to endure discomfort. In that case the metrics are mute.

There is no point in setting a sail on a yacht if there is no wind,
and if there is no wind there is nothing for the instruments to measure.

There’s no buying desire through equipment, no heart and gut is going to surface through the use of the latest wind tunnel tested gadget.

You are human, you have to learn to hurt, and when you do it properly it stops hurting, how ironic that is.

Nothing in the hurting changes except your acceptance, and in the acceptance comes relief and the knowledge that pain is energy just like you are. The athletes centre is a field of vibrating energy just like the pain is.

What the athlete often fails to realise is that he or she is not an object.

Athletes obsessing in the world of objects instead of the process is like a starving African wandering, hopelessly lost in desert with a Macdonald’s voucher.

Grant Giles created Sports Supports after 30 years as both an athlete and coach, and 10 years studying ego psychology. Grant understands first hand what it takes to succeed in sport, regardless of which sport this is, and what level you are competing at.
Not only does Grant understand the ego at an athletic level, Grant has also suffered from anxiety and depression throughout his life, having experienced first hand the debilitating effects of the mind.
Grant has an easy, caring nature that allows him to meet his clients in a way that creates an ease that allows him to facilitate personal growth whether that be on a sporting or personal level, or both.